When you are getting into the wrapping process, there are a few key points that you need to focus on.

First and foremost is tension. Tension is one of the most important things for keeping your thread secure around the rod guides, and looking good on the rod itself.

What you can use to measure this tension is our tension rod, mounted at the top of our HWS1 Hand Wrapper. What you want to achieve is the tension rod pointing directly at your chest, you do not want to bode down to far down pointing down at the wrapper or too loose, having it point up at the ceiling.

Once you’re ready to begin to wrap, you are going to take you thread, and bring it up to the blank. Next you are going to wrap around the blank, 2 times.

Holding pressure with your finger, you are going to take the thread coming off the spool and jump over top of those rotations, securing the thread in place. Maintaining pressure with your finger, you are going to rotate the rod, 2 or 3 times, making sure that everything is held tightly together.

We can then continue to release and continue our wrap. After you have laid down 6 – 8 rotations, you can take your thread clippers and cut to what we refer as the tag end.

You can then proceed to finish wrapping down the blank.

When you get to the transition from the blank on to the guide foot, that’s where our process earlier by prepping the guide foot and grinding it down will come into play. By making the nice smooth transition, the thread should just roll from the blank on to the top of the guide without any effort.

Once you have wrapped up to the masking tape, we’re going to carefully remove the masking, (being especially careful not to pull the guide foot out from underneath the guide wrap). We can now continue wrapping our guide in place. If there are any gaps formed, take your burnishing tool and press the thread back into place, eliminating any gaps that may form in our guide wrap.

Once we get about an eighth of an inch away from the fork on guide foot, you want to put what we call a “Pull Through” in between the wraps to secure the thread in place.

To do this you are going to make a loop out of a small piece of thread, preferably with a different color so it is easier to see, and put it directly underneath the thread we are currently wrapping.

The key point to remember with the “Pull Through” is the loop goes the direction that you are wrapping the guide. As you continue to wrap over the Pull Through, be sure to at least complete 6 to 8 rotations around the rod blank before actually completing your thread wrap.

Now, holding pressure with your finger, you are going to release some pressure from the hand wrapper spool, and with your clippers cut the thread. Next, take the thread end and drop that piece through the loop we created with our Pull Through loop.

Once through the pull through loop, you can release the pressure with our finger, holding pressure with our other hand, grab the two loose ends and pull the thread back underneath the thread wrap.

You can now go ahead and take your straight edge razor blade, laying it flat against the back of my wrap, pull the thread into the blade, cutting it cleanly from the guide wrap.

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